And after all that work with iTunes getting it sort of your way!
Grin
So yeah.. I was really excited that iTunes was mostly cooperative with the Apple Scripts which I had installed. The scripts did two things for me:
1. One script was supposed to watch folders that I specified for it to watch as I added or removed new files to and from it. It would then "simply" add these files to the iTunes library/xml database.
2. The second script was made to have the files in my library mirror the way the actual files look outside of any sort of database or metadata view. So albums would be in the order they were made to go, and all files would be labeled with the numbers assigned in their id tags, which for SoME strange reason, iTunes NEVER got right. EVER.
I'd have been very happy to use iTunes and iTunes only, but these scripts are very far from fully functional. Problem with the first script:
You literally have to set each child folder to be watched, or else nothing will happen ! For example, I just added Jay Z's latest album to its parent folder which is of course "Jay Z". But unless I set the script to watch "Jay Z" it's useless. And there's NO WAY I'm going to manually add every root folder..craziness.
The second script is good, but for some reason doesn't work with all my files. I had three albums in particular which I really wanted in the order they were released, and I had even manually put a 1,2 and 3 before the album names so they'd be listed as such in the library. But every time I activated the script for those albums, after I hit play on any of the songs, they'd revert to their previous state.
I might have been able to fix it with a bit of looking into the metadata, but quite frankly, I could care less now. iTunes can go jump off a great big building. It's just such an overly complicated application, which should have been given the same options as every other media player in the world.
Songbird... easy as pie. Direct it to where my media is, and BAM. Imports nice and fast. No redundant files being copied, only to have to delete the originals, and then find the new ones strewn about in random folders even though they're from the same album... Just the same folder structure and hierarchy you started with.
I will say one thing about iTunes that I like though... I think the sound enhancer makes a difference when playing music through the laptop speakers as well as these cruddy $20 speakers I've been using for a couple of months now. The EQ for Songbird is good, and improves things a lot, but the sound enhancer for iTunes gives that nice illusion of separation.
Won't matter when I get new speakers though. Which hopefully will be in the next couple of weeks.
Doug